@Mercer: I'm a Lovecraft fiend. If I had to narrow it down I'd say The Colour Out of Space. Seems more frightening to me for its lack of cults and gods (though I do love me some of them). And for good measure also The Shadow Out of Time; it does an excellent creepy job of making humanity feel cosmically insignificant.

For my own reading, finally grabbed a copy of Ubik and looking forward to a good PKD mind-rinse.

I just finished Kobold Wizard's Dildo of Enlightenment +2 for my bad book review podcast.

It is just as good as you might imagine based off of the title.

Recently also finished Matthew Stover's Caine's Law, which is the fourth book in the series. A little confusing as the plot jumps around between different times and various possible realities but, hey, it's Caine so of course I'm going to read it.

@Mercer and J.Brennan

Mine has always been a fan of "The Music of Erich Zann". Something about the doomed musician fighting to keep the horror from beyond reality locked away, up until the final end, and failing pretty much captures Lovecraft's theme of "you're human, you're fucked, and there's damn little you can do to stop it" perfectly for me. Other than that I think "Shadow over Innsmouth" is a close second.

I finally finished the Jack Vance homage collection Songs of the Dying Earth. The last two stories were by George R.R. Martin and Neil Gaiman. Both excellent. I highly recommend the collection to Jack Vance fans.

I bought my third-ever electronic book, Beyond Outrage by Robert Reich, the former labor secretary and liberal pundit. I started it last night. Based on the introduction, it can be summed up as "The middle and working class have been screwed; we've worked ourselves into an economic and political corner; it won't get any better unless people stop bitching and organize."

Just finished "Girl Who Played with Fire." I liked it, but not nearly as much as I liked the first one (this one was more "meh,"), so I read this NY Times review on "Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" to help me determine if I want to spend the time to read the third in the series or not. I had to chuckle because that review accurately described my feelings on the books so far. Especially the bit about how much coffee people seem to drink in this story, and how often he uses the word "whore" as a way to make someone an instant bad-guy.

But these transparently “activist” moments are forgivable, as is the pathological coffee drinking, a tic that recurs so relentlessly that I don’t think Larsson realized it was a tic. A thought on this subject: Many of the Larsson faithful subscribe to a belief that the author’s premature death was not of natural causes. He had been threatened in real life by skinheads and neo-Nazis; ergo, the theories go, he was made dead by the very sorts of heavies who crop up in his novels. But such talk has been emphatically dismissed by Larsson’s intimates. So let me advance my own theory: Coffee killed him.

The coffee tic doesn't bother me, it's just hard to ignore how much coffee those people drink. And reading those books made me want coffee; my caffeine intake definitely went up the last couple weeks while I read the first two books.

Intentional wish-fulfillment fantasies bug the heck out of me. Mostly because it makes a book feel really fan-ficy and makes the characters utterly unrealistic.

@Mercer Is that the complete works of HPL that I found in the Barnes and Noble Classics section, next to the Poe, Wells, Verne, Hawthorne, Austen, etc? Purple cosmic type cover.

Way back, I emailed S.T. Joshi to see if there was an all-in-one volume of HPL and that stalwart biographer teased me to watch the stores. In two weeks, that single massive tome had been published. I'm almost done with it, and I'm on the essay "Supernatural In Literature."

I'm about to start digging into the Lovecraftian correspondence. My goal is to have some sort of HPL one man show I can perform, and I think I have a way into it. Fingers crossed. That enthusiasm notwithstanding, it took me forever to get through all of The Complete Works. I devoured HPL in college, but it was rough going this time. The best stories were the ones that always seem to stand out, but any others were a tough row to hoe. It made me wonder what had changed in me since I was last immersed in the text, and that that might be sometime to pay attention to if I'm bringing HPL to curious theatre noobs.

Umm, if you click on the link, it's a fan-made compilation of 'all the original stories which Lovecraft wrote as an adult', available free as an EPUB or MOBI file. I'm reading on the Kindle, and haven't come across any glitches / typos so far. No essays or correspondence, so I guess 'Complete' is stretching it a bit...

In other news, I just finished El Dorado, a Scarlet Pimpernel novel, and The Humbugs of the World by P.T. Barnum, which might be the most descriptive source on the Davenport Brothers' psychic swindle that I can find.

The Larsson books and the movies are still on my To Consume list, but as a Norwegian, let me tell you this: Scandinavian do drink a FUCKLOAD of coffee. Like, you have no idea (Unless you're Scandinavian). Take the words "tea", "pint", "bitter" and "lager" in British media and replace all of them with "coffee". Then you're getting close.

Coffee is the social drink there for any time other than the weekend. You don't get together for pints, you get together for coffee.

The DILEMMA part is that I have a giant backlog of things to read, and it's taken me a year and a half to slog through half a book that I enjoy but ultimately have to force myself to read. The wife jokes that I should just wait the ten years that it took for Cervantes to publish Part Two, and I'm inclined to go along with it.

I'm sort of with Bill, here, but say you enjoy it but you have to make yourself read it, and it depends on the ratio between those two.

I have really enjoyed some classics, and found others dry like old leaves. I don't think everything you read should be a page-turner, but if it feels like eat-your-greens homework to pick up and go through, there are thousands more books youll never have the time to read. I really don't think there's any duty to read even something like Don Quixote.